Latest in Comments on Science and Academia
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Template response to Elsevier review requests
Dear colleague: Thank you for considering me for providing review services to your esteemed journal. Please note, however, that I am unable to provide these services for free, because your journal is an Elsevier journal. From 2019 to 2023, German researchers were excluded from reading their own and colleagues’ research, if this research was stored…
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Creative practice for dealing with obnoxious reviewers
Also, I guess for sticking it to somebody else.
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Some associated editors should grow a spine
There, it happened again. An associate editor of a prestigious software engineering journal rejected our paper, because they wouldn’t overrule a single bogus review. In the current case, all reviewers were on plain accept, with one holdout, reviewer 2, who recommended a plain reject. (The paper was the first revised version of the original submission.)…
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Editorial quality at Elsevier
If you ever wondered about editorial quality at Elsevier, look no further. Original here and in case it gets fixed, on the Web Archive here, and finally the PDF.
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Another unintended benefit of chat AIs
Professors always hope for crisp, clear, and correct answers from students in response to questions. Often, we get wishy-washy answers that make us despair. This gets particularly bad when asking for a term definition. For example, I might ask: “What is a for loop in computer programming?” hoping for something like “A for loop is…
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Writing recommendation letters using a chat AI
It is the first week of the new year, and I already got three student requests for recommendation letters. Writing recommendation letters is an important duty of a professor, but writing letters for students who took exactly one course with with me ten years ago is stretching this duty. Thankfully, chat AIs can help–or can…